Informal vote may have cost Labor seats

By Tim Battin

September 4, 2010 — 7.51am

An essential piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the 2010 election, telling us something about both the bizarre campaign and the historically unusual result, is the level of disengagement of the electorate. Australia's compulsory voting system can disguise the degree of political disenchantment, but that isn't to say other markers are not available.

One clear cursor of the electorate's dissatisfaction is the increase in the informal vote in the past two decades. The 1990 election, heralding the arrival of minor parties, recorded an informal vote in the House of Representatives of 3.2 per cent. The general trend since then has been up. The two exceptions are the polarised election of 1993 (when it fell slightly to 3 per cent) and the 2007 election that brought Rudd Labor to office.

The ALP machine has given little attention to the increase in the informal vote in the past two decades.Credit:Andrew Meares

The ALP machine gave little attention to the fall in the informal vote in the 2007 election, much less what this might have meant. In that election, where the ALP needed 16 seats to win, there were no fewer than 19 seats in which the informal vote was higher than the two-party-preferred margin! In that change-of-government election the informal vote fell from the 5.2 per cent of 2004 to 3.9 per cent. The assumption underlying the views of those who think this is important is that most voters who consciously cast an informal vote are potential Labor voters who make a judgment that they are unrepresented.

What happened in 2007 is not inconsistent with this assumption. It was an election in which a (partial) re-engagement of the electorate could be attributed to the massive community mobilisation around industrial relations and to significant social concern about climate change. There was also a less defined factor associated with a public perception that services in public health and education needed improvement. For the first time since 1993, an election was being defined on terms that would suit the ALP.

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The response of Rudd Labor, before and after the 2007 poll, was that its leadership and campaign brilliance brought about the change in the electorate's stance. Ignoring the community mobilisation around industrial relations was problematic enough; but splitting the difference with WorkChoices and abandoning action over climate change reinforced a public perception that the ALP wanted the engagement of the voter only at the ballot box — or, as it turns out, not even that.

The ALP machine failed to recognise how critical it was that one in every five people who voted informally in 2004 decided it was worth casting a valid vote at the 2007 election. Thus it was easy for these folk to slip back into disengagement, and they did. The informal vote at the August 2010 election stands at 5.6 per cent, restoring the upward trend. In some safe Labor seats the informal vote exceeds 10 per cent.

If an appeal to the ALP machine to enfranchise its own supporters is too idealistic – such is the cynicism of the party leadership – one might have thought that the machine would be more responsive to the electoral threat posed by the present trend. Yet even now, with the dust about to settle, the ALP machine shows little sign of this.

So let it be spelt out in terms it will understand. In the two Victorian seats won by the ALP, together with narrowly retained Corangamite, the increase in the informal vote was held to an average of 0.6 of a percentage point. (The increase across the state was double.) Elsewhere, in the clutch of marginal seats retained by the ALP, the informal vote climbed by 1.4 percentage points (a bit less than the national average of 1.7 percentage points). The seats lost to the Coalition recorded an increase in the informal vote of 1.9 percentage points. This might not sound like a lot, but it had dire consequences for the ALP in several seats.

In Brisbane, Solomon, and Boothby, Labor would have brought the count to the last handful of votes were it not for the increase in the informal vote. In Forde, Macquarie, and the tantalisingly close seat of Hasluck, the Coalition would not have been a show if just two-thirds of the increase in the informal vote had gone to Labor instead.

Of course, that tally is to deliberately understate the significance of all this. It is to say nothing of what might have been had Labor inspired the electorate, and reduced the informal vote. To put all this another way, the disjuncture between the ALP and its potential support is pretty much where it was in 2004. There are now 16 marginal Coalition seats in which the informal vote is higher than the margin needed to take the seat. In several of these the ratio is 3:1. In some it is much more.

Much commentary on the 2010 election has been about symptoms or side effects — the poor campaigning, inane slogans, or silly distractions — rather than the disease itself. If the parliamentary ALP can't bring itself to try a more effective politics for the sake of working people or disadvantaged groups, or a better society, it might at least ponder such a task in its own interests.

Dr Tim Battin is senior lecturer in political and international studies in the School of Humanities at the University of New England.

The ALP machine gave little attention to the fall in the informal vote in the 2007 election, much less what this might have meant.